Wednesday, 4 January 2012

The Arcade in Cleveland, Ohio (built 1890), looking south toward Euclid Avenue: photo by Martin Linsey for Historic American Building Survey, 7 March 1966 (Library of Congress)

"In speaking of the inner boulevards," says the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a complete picture of the city on the Seine and its environs from the year 1852, 'we have made mention again and again of the arcades which open onto them. These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need. During sudden rainshowers, the arcades are a place of refuge for the unprepared, to whom they offer a secure, if restricted, promenade -- one from which the merchants also benefit.”

This passage is the locus classicus for the presentation of the arcades; for not only do the divagations on the flâneur and the weather develop out of it, but also, what there is to be said about the construction of the arcades, in an economic and architectural vein, would have a place here.

The covered shopping arcades of the nineteenth century were Benjamin's central image because they were the precise material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconscious of the dreaming collective. All the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity fetishism, reification, the world as "inwardness"), as well as (in fashion, prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams. Moreover, the arcades were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of the lived experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation. By the end of the nineteenth century, arcades had become the hallmark of a "modern" metropolis (as well as of western imperial domination), and had been imitated throughout the world, from Cleveland to Istanbul, from Glasgow to Johannesburg, from Buenos Aires to Melbourne. And as Benjamin was well aware, they also could be found in each of the cities that had become points of his intellectual compass: Naples, Moscow, Paris, Berlin.Susan Buck-Morss: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 1989

7 comments:

Interesting how they look like places of worship when depicted like this. Also interesting to see that they can are actually quite attractive in photographs. I have this odd physical reaction when in malls of needing to exit asap.

Fascinating and informative for me Tom. Like Nin I hate being in these places, but the architectual majesty depicted in some of these shots (the older ones reminding me of the old departed and dearly missed, at least by me, Penn Station in NYC) rivals, as Nin alludes to, some of the more impressive churches and cathedrals. I've been in some of the old European ones and a few of the modern ones here but they make me so agitated and almost dizzy I never really got a chance to appreciate the splendor and monumental aspects of them that make them, good or bad, impressive seen this way (for the most part, the abandoned one(s) even, I've always been a fan of industrial ruins having grown up in North Jersey, as damaging as they have been and can be).

Does the condition of contemporary existence creep ever closer to the vertiginous state of dreaming one's lost in the mall or the multiplex after closing time?

Benjamin's curious romance with the arcades was founded in experience, research and poetic dreaming. He saw the great arcades of Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Naples as prefigurations of a global/international modernism spawned by late industrial capitalism. Their multiplying representations and semblances, he speculated, disclosed an archeological history that could be read as bearing witness to the phantasmagoria of the present. These first shopping malls, in his vision, spoke to an empty future from a cluttered past, giving voice to the collective origins of commodity fetishism by a kind of materialist ventriloquism.

places of worship when depicted like this...odd physical reaction when in malls of needing to exit asap.

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure dome decree. . .

Meanwhile, Johnny and I went to see The Adventures of Tintin at the Northgate Mall in San Rafael last week -- complete culture shock

Beautiful and depressing and wrium

Check out the West Edmonton Mall, grandaddy of them all!

the architectural majesty depicted in some of these shots (the older ones reminding me of the old departed and dearly missed, at least by me, Penn Station in NYC) rivals, as Nin alludes to, some of the more impressive churches and cathedrals. I've been in some of the old European ones and a few of the modern ones here but they make me so agitated and almost dizzy I never really got a chance to appreciate the splendor and monumental aspects

the last "shot"--a case of "shop till you drop," eh?

The references to cathedrals/places of worship were echoed here. Angelica pointed out the interesting link between Benjamin's fascination with the architecture of the arcades and his (quite emotional) involvement with the grand church architecture of the Loire valley.